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Illustration and design blog advocating freehand drawing in the design process.Wed, 25 Apr 2018 23:36:14 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.9.5Dreaming at Gunpointhttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/FreehandFuturist/~3/jnaorx1py1c/
http://freehandfuturist.com/dreaming-gunpoint/#respondWed, 16 Nov 2016 05:30:58 +0000http://freehandfuturist.com/?p=2932016 has been indescribable, and I really mean that. Mostly I find myself completely helpless to do anything but daydream… Dreaming to escape a world currently holding a gun to all of our heads…

But the more I dream of escape, the bigger that gun becomes. The island utopia in my mind slowly grows into a looming volcanic threat. Then I remember…

We can’t escape, no matter how much we dream. So instead we have to dream of a better future, and set out to build that future together. I’m scared of the years ahead, as are many of my peers, but we can’t let that rule our lives. Of course oppression and bigotry suck, but we’re not powerless.

Recently I began to re-read Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man” which I first read in high school. I won’t go into detail here (yet), but the story is a powerful one. The protagonist is a mid-20th century black man, but his struggle is still widely shared (sadly). Through his experiences, he discovers that his “invisibility” while on the surface seems powerless… beneath that his real power is immense. We the oppressed DO have power over our oppressors, not only because they fear us, but because they can never TRULY SEE us. Ellison introduces the book with two quotations, one from Melville (yuck) and the other from T.S. Elliot.

HARRY: I tell you, it is not me you are looking at,
Not me you are grinning at, not me your confidential looks
Incriminate, but that other person, if person,
You thought I was: let your necrophily
Feed upon that carcase…

In this tutorial we will explore a technique to use hand-drawn textures in digital illustration. This method is quick, and simple to use. However, it requires that you take some time to understand the application before getting started. The first part of this tutorial is about making textures and preparing them for digital art. The second part will demonstrate a method to paint with texture and apply some color theory. This will all be created using Photoshop CS3, and should take anywhere from 1-3 hours, depending on the textures you make.

Part One: Making Hand-Drawn Textures

Grab some paper and any materials you would like to use. Things that work well include: wet and dry washes (both ink and watercolor, although ink tends to work better), charcoal (the darker the better, I prefer “sketch charcoal” from General’s, willow charcoal is just too soft and gray, unless that’s what you are going for), and acrylics. When choosing paper make sure it’s a heavier weight, but don’t go overboard and limit yourself by trying to get something that will last forever— after you scan them, you can throw them away (although I like to keep mine, and I highly recommend it)—they don’t have to be perfect or “display” worthy. For example, my textures all buckled when they dried, but it was not a problem because they were flattened on the scanner bed. This process can be pretty forgiving, so just choose some papers that you like and have fun.

Break Out the Art Supplies

For this tutorial I created five textures. You can follow along or create your own. Make sure your samples will fit on a scanner bed.

Charcoal: First, create a light gray background, rubbing the charcoal smooth and even. On top of that put a rougher, darker layer, with no rubbing. Apply some fixative and you’re done.

Wet-Wash: Tape your paper down around the edges with masking tape (which you should do for any wet media in this tutorial). You can apply a wash in two ways: by wetting the paper first, or just painting it on. For my texture I lightly wet the paper with a sponge and then applied a semi-dark ink wash on the wet surface. Allow the surface to dry completely. If you are not happy with the wash’s shade, it can be adjusted in Photoshop or you can add another layer. If you decide to add another layer be very careful as you don’t want to destroy the layer below (which is especially true if you are using watercolor instead of ink).

Dry-Sponge: For this I used some acrylic screen-printing ink that was hiding in some boxes. You can use regular acrylic paint, although the ink is formulated for paper and has nice coverage. Sponge it on however you would like and give it time to dry. Be careful not to go overboard as that will ruin the texture.

Wet-sponge: To get a wet and splotchy sponge effect, dilute your acrylic and moisten your sponge. Again, be careful not to go overboard or you will lose your texture.

Lined-wash: Using the wet-sponge with your acrylic, swipe it across the paper in smooth, even strokes covering as much area as possible. Try not to go over areas you have already covered. For my texture I used a paper with a line texture, which enhanced what was left by the sponge.

Scanning Your Textures

After everything has dried, scan the textures in at high resolution. The scanner I use goes as high as 600dpi, which means at print resolution (300dpi) the texture will be twice the actual size. That also means that the texture will appear “zoomed in” when not scaled to that resolution. That’s okay— in fact, it’s what we want. The texture’s scale will be changed later, so at this point we want it to be really large. This allows it to be used at many resolutions, and produce many different effects, which I will explain later.

Part Two: Preparing the textures

You should now have some digital images of your textures. Open each one and copy the background layer, save them as Photoshop Documents (.psd). Apply any adjustments you would like and merge those layers into the background copy layer (don’t worry , you can always recopy the original background). Later you will need a flat layer to define your texture in Photoshop, so you can flatten it later if you like.

You may de-saturate (or gray-scale) the texture with another adjustment layer. We will be applying these textures with the paintbrush tool, which interprets the texture image in gray-scale, and applies color accordingly. I prefer to keep them in color, in case I ever want to use the texture for a fill and would like to keep the color. Either way, the paintbrush tool will interpret the texture in gray-scale.

Cropping the Texture to Size

Crop your texture to a size that’s large, and fairly uniform (or not). Before we define this texture as a pattern in Photoshop, we need to make a choice. When Photoshop uses patterns it tiles them— meaning it repeats the pattern infinitely in all directions. If you define the pattern as it is now, it won’t tile perfectly, and edges will show. If you are okay with that, then select the entire canvas while on the texture layer. In the main menu, go to Edit > Define Pattern, name it, save it, and you’re done.

Choose a fairly uniform area and crop.

If however, you do not want seams to appear, then you need to make the pattern into a repeating tile before defining it as a pattern.

Making Your Texture Seamless

With your texture layer selected in the layers palette, select the entire canvas. In the main menu go to Filter > Other > Offset. Check the preview box and make sure “wrap around” is selected. Change the horizontal and vertical offset until the seams (which you can now see) are somewhere in the middle of the canvas.

Enable "wrap around" in the offset filter and your seams will appear.

Grab the clone-stamp tool and change the brush settings to a fairly large, soft-brush. The size and softness will need to be adjusted for your texture. The idea here is to get a brush that’s large enough to cover and blend the seams with the surrounding area, but soft so that it blends with the background closer to the brush edges. Select an area that is similar to what’s around the seams, hold the option key and click to sample the area. Release the option key and click over the area of the seam you would like to patch. Continue sampling and cloning until the seams have all been patched.

Continue using the clone stamp until the seems disappear, going careful and slow helps.

Define the Texture as a Pattern

Now you have a pattern that can tile seamlessly, so select the entire canvas (on the texture layer of course) and in the main menu go to Edit > Define Pattern. Name it and save it and you are done.

Repeat this entire process of cropping, offsetting, and blending for each of the patterns you made earlier.

Part Three: Applying Texture to a Brush

Now that you have your textures you are ready to start painting in Photoshop. Grab the brush tool and open the brush options fly-out menu. Click the checkbox next to the “Texture” label, and select the label to open the options window. Open the texture dropdown and select your newly defined texture.

Within the brush palette, click on texture and check the box to reveal the texture options.

There are some important options here that need some explaining:

Invert: this inverts your pattern’s gray-scale image, making light into dark and dark into light. Sometimes this is useful, especially if you want darker coverage, but it may not work well for all patterns. Also, if you paint one layer of the texture without this checked, and then paint another on top with it checked, the textures cancel each other out and make a solid color with no pattern.

Mixing Mode: Set this to multiply. The only other option that seems to do any good is color burn, which in my experience practically destroys the texture, so use with caution. The other blending modes work, but they depend on the background you use, and the colors you use, so we won’t go into those.

Depth: Just don’t mess with this, I honestly have no idea exactly what it does, but you can play with it and see the preview at the bottom of the window.

Scale: This is THE MOST IMPORTANT option in this box. Essentially, this controls the “zoom level” of the texture, and its overall appearance.

Changing the Texture’s Appearance

The appearance of the texture depends on the size and resolution of the document you are painting in. Since the textures we made earlier are so large (600dpi), at 100% on a canvas with a lower resolution (say 72ppi), it appears as though we are looking through a magnifying glass— so we have to scale it down. When you reduce the scale, it appears to “zoom out” from the texture, and vice versa. You could say the texture’s appearance is relative to the document settings and the texture scale applied to the brush. A benefit of this relative scaling is that you can get multiple effects from a single texture simply by changing the scale, pretty neat!

The drawback however is that you will have to experiment with the texture at different resolutions and settings. To make this easier we will create some reference materials that demonstrate how our texture behaves.

Part Four: Developing a Technique

Open a new Photoshop document set at 72ppi, any size you prefer. Start by making a row of 10 square swatches filled with black. Merge all the swatches into one layer if you prefer (like I do), and make a copy for later, turning the copy layer off.

Understanding Texture Scale

Command-click the layer swatch in the layers palette to select the swatches, and select the layer. Press delete and clear out all the black fills. Now you are ready to start painting within the selection. Set black as the foreground color, brush hardness to 100%, and the size to something you can carefully paint the swatches with. In the brush texture options set the scale to 100%.

Use the brush to fill the swatch on the far right. Do this in one pass (one click) by overlapping or scribbling with the brush. If you don’t fill the entire swatch in one pass, when you paint the unfilled area it will darken where it overlaps the previous pass. This is where a tablet comes in handy as you can carefully scribble to fill the swatch.

Lower the texture’s scale to 90% and fill the swatch to the left. Repeat this 8 more times, reducing the scale by 10% each step to the left.

When you are finished you should have ten swatches that give you an idea of how the scale of the texture affects the appearance. It also shows what your texture looks like on a white background with the options I described earlier. It doesn’t look like much, but it quickly shows you what scale range you might want to use to get the texture you want.

The swatches here show how the texture changes as its scale changes.

Understanding Color Application: Technique #1

I will be painting everything on single layers, but if you would like to keep each texture layer separate, they will blend the same, and you can play with opacity and blend modes.

Create 5 new swatches and clear the selection. Looking at my texture scale I like the texture at 30%, so that’s the scale I’ll use. Select a color and paint the texture into the swatches in one pass. Notice here that the color is dull compared to the color selected. Paint another layer on 4 of the swatches. This darkens the color and texture. Paint another layer on the next 3 swatches, and repeat, decreasing each layer by one swatch. You now have 5 swatches in order of lightest to darkest with increased layers of texture.

Layering the texture on top of itself intensifies the color and diminishes the texture's appearance.

The most important observation you should make here is that each layer you add darkens the texture, and shifts the color towards the one you have selected. This method works well, but expect to use more than one layer to get it dark enough. Also, be cautious of adding too many layers as the texture will vanish into a solid color. Try it with another color to see how different colors work (for example, red always looks pink with this method, and yellow makes the texture almost invisible).

Understanding Color Application: Technique #2

Another method for painting is to create a solid fill below the painted texture. In this method you can literally “mix” the colors by painting in layers, much like on a real canvas. This method has a lot of benefits— most importantly, your colors will be more vibrant and have greater texture density. To start, we will mix primary colors, but you can mix color as freely as you like.

Copy the 5 swatches made earlier, and fill them with black. Copy again, move the swatches down and select a red and a yellow color. Fill the first five swatches with yellow, and the second five with red. Set the red color as the foreground and make sure your texture settings are the same as before. Paint the red texture over 4 of the swatches, leaving one to show the fill color. Paint another layer of texture over the next 3 swatches, and repeat, reducing the number of swatches with each layer until you have 4 textured swatches representing 1-4 layers of texture. Repeat this process with the red fills and yellow texture.

Layering the texture on top of a fill produces a more vibrant color and texture.

Stop, it’s time to make some observations. The following are my observations and may not be true for the textures you use:

Putting one layer of texture on the fill takes the color halfway to the texture’s color, creating the secondary colors. Meaning— if I have a yellow fill and I paint a red texture on top, the overall color will become orange. The same is true for a red fill and yellow texture. However, the orange made with a yellow fill will be lighter than the one made with the red fill.

Adding more layers of texture creates the tertiary colors. In my case, adding more red texture to the yellow fill made red-orange, and adding more yellow texture to the red fill made yellow-orange.

As more layers of texture are added, the color approaches the texture color. In my case that’s primary red and yellow. This produces primary colors that are much more vibrant than if you were to paint multiple layers of just the texture, like in technique #1. In this way you can also “tint” your primaries, like creating a bright yellow with just a hint of green or orange, depending on what color you are mixing from.

Repeat these steps to create swatches for red/blue, and yellow/blue. After that you should have a full range of color, moving all the way around the color wheel. In my document I also created some swatches showing how to get textured primary colors and gray values. The last thing to do is label your swatch groups, and make any notes about how they were mixed. Save the document for future reference. Here’s one that I created:

This is my texture reference; here I show the texture's scale and color relationships.

Conclusion

Now you are ready to start making some digital art. The techniques presented here are only one method to create and use hand-drawn textures in Photoshop. Of course there are many ways to do this, and as always you are encouraged to explore this technique and others. I hope this gave you a good platform to start incorporating hand-made textures into your digital works. Enjoy!

What’s in the Download

In this download I’m giving away all the seamless textures I created in this tutorial. You are free to use them any way you like as I am releasing them under a public domain license.

To the extent possible under law,Morgan Finley has waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to this work.

There are many great brushes and techniques to produce ink wash in Photoshop, but they all fall short of the real thing. Why? Because Photoshop is missing the most essential ingredient for ink wash— WATER. Ink wash and water color rely on the flow of water to produce a wide range of effects, including gradients, blotches, and pooling of pigments. In this tutorial I will show how to combine tracing and ink wash to produce a work of art that you can scan and use in digital works. Rather than giving a step-by-step instruction, I will instead explain the techniques and media used to create the image so you can apply them to your own works. Ready?

Tracing is not cheating- a brief manifesto

That’s right, tracing is not cheating. I used to believe it was, and there are many people who still do. That belief is wrong because it assumes you are copying what is being traced, but that’s just not true. Have you ever seen a hand-traced image that looks exactly like the original? No? I haven’t either. The reality is that tracing does not copy, instead it creates something new by re-purposing the existing image. Like drawing, tracing involves making artistic choices such as where to put lines and how detailed the image should be. Don’t let the “tracing is cheating” belief limit you. Embrace tracing for what it really is— a tool you can use in your creative process. I’m not saying you should trace everything, but that tracing is something you can use to further your process.

There are many uses for tracing within art and design. For example, many people trace their own sketches, often to create multiple variations of an image. This works great for logos,layouts, illustrations and even animations. Photos can also be used, although the intent and approach is often very different. When using photos, don’t try to look at them as photos, because that will limit the image’s potential. Instead, look at photos as a reference to discover the subtlety and structure of your subject. Lastly, don’t feel that you have to keep tracing; if you learned something and feel you want to draw it by hand, take it to the computer or move in a completely different direction— GO FOR IT!

The Tracing Process

For this trace my goal is to create a line drawing that will be a loose, but reasonably detailed guide for my ink wash. I don’t want to be too literal and try to capture all the details, because I can always develop them later with wash. So I take a more figurative and loose approach, picking and developing the main details and structure of the image. I start by looking at which lines are the most important. That sounds easy, but often when I REALLY look and think, I discover new subleties, such as a person’s likeness. Then, as I start sketching I focus on how the lines contain the forms of the image. This is how my process generally works because I feel gives the trace it’s magic— it’s not a boring, detailed and un-inventive copy. Instead it’s something new. I encourage you to find your own approach to tracing in the same way I did, by experimenting and exploring. I am writing this tutorial from my approach, but don’t let that limit yours.

Preparing Your Image

You can trace from virtually any image including sketches and photos, but be careful as some images may have copyrights. Tracing from photos often requires some adjustments, depending on the use of the image and artistic preference. In general, if I’m using a photo I will first remove the color, making it a grayscale image. Then I adjust the contrast, brightness and exposure levels to fit my needs. I prefere higher contrast with washed out whites and deep blacks. I find this works best to see the details and value differences. Experiment with different adjustments to best fit your style and desired effect.

Black and white image of me, after adjusting the contrast, brightness and exposure levels.

A Few Supplies

After preparing your image, all you need are need tracing paper and a pencil. A light box also comes in handy, but if you are cheap like me, you can make due with a window or computer screen. If you are using a computer screen, be careful not to press hard, you don’t want to damage it. I use my laptop screen tilted back with a blank browser window (bright white) and it suits my needs just fine.

Trace and Transfer

Start by tracing your image to your liking, feel free to make multiples and scrap some. The next step is to transfer your image to your paper, preferably watercolor paper or even some printmaking papers will work nicely. If you have carbon transfer paper, then you probably know what to do already. If not there’s a simple method using only a soft pencil (2B and HB work great). Turn your trace over and trace again on the back, following the lines on the front. Feel free to leave out lines and details you might not want anymore. Then turn the trace back to the front and place it on your paper. You might want some tape to hold it down. Trace once more over the lines you made from the photo and remove the tracing paper. What you now have is a faint copy of your lines on heavy paper. You can now go over the lines with a pencil if you like, or leave them faint.

My final pencil trace before putting the image on watercolor paper.

Introducing Ink

Ink wash and watercolor can appear to be very difficult, but mastering the basics can be easily done with a little experimentation and practice. I say experimentation and practice because there is no better way to learn. That is how I learned, by experimenting, observing and trying new things. If you have never used watercolor or ink wash, I suggest you start by reading a few books that have good demonstrations of basic techniques. Let these books serve only as launching points for your own explorations; nothing in them will make any real sense until you try for yourself, at which point you might start learning more than any book could teach. I could spend paragraphs explaining exactly how I made the image, but I won’t. Instead I will explain the principles of ink wash to guide you in your own experiments.

Mixing ink wash

There are a lot of ways to mix ink wash. One common method is to use watercolor pans to mix small amounts of wash. Generally, that tends to start your mixes on the darker side of the value scale because most often you are adding water to ink. One benefit of this method is that it gives you the space to make multiple shades for use. My method is different, but also common, in that it adds ink to a larger amount of water (the opposite of the pan method). I begin by filling a small jar with clean water, usually about a third full. Then I add about six drops of India Ink (I like the cheap bottles of Higgens india ink, the tops double as a dropper) and do a test wash. At this point the ink is pretty dilute, so I add more ink in incremental steps, testing between each. I usually add about three drops per increment, and test between each. When I start to get close to the shade I’m looking for, I stop and wait for the swatches to dry so I can see how they look after. I’ve found that inks dry just a little bit darker than they look when they are wet, which is typical of a lot of paints. You can continue mixing incrementally to the shade you would like to use. I usually stop between ten and twenty percent gray. This gives me a tone that both fills nicely and layers well to make darker shades. Experiment with whatever suits your style and purpose.

Wash: the basics of taming water

Ink wash works exactly the same as watercolor; pigments are suspended in water and then “washed” onto the support (paper). There are many kinds of washes to create a variety of effects including wet-on-wet, wet-on-dry, and many gradation techniques. All of these techniques depend on three factors; the amount of wash used, the dryness of the paper, and the movement of pigments as they settle and dry. The first two are things that can be controlled by loading your brush with more or less pigments or by wetting the paper (or letting it dry). You should also be aware of how the pigments act on the surface and texture of your paper; always test your paper by making swatches and observing how the pigment settles, mixes and dries. When you make washes, keep these things in mind and try to use them to your advantage.

The first basic wash is a flat wash. It’s simple but takes some practice. To do this, load your brush and spread the wash evenly over an area of dry paper. Try not to go back over areas that have already been covered as you spread the pigment around. Depending on how the wash flows and spreads, two different effects can be produced. If you spread it evenly without allowing the liquid to pool, then it will dry to an even tone. Allowing pools to form will cause more pigments to settle at the edges, creating gradations of tone. This can be compared to how a drop of pigment dries— dark at the edges and light in the center. Controlling the spread and flow of the wash takes awareness and practice. If you have trouble controling this, a paper towel or dry brush can be used to collect excess wash, and a wet brush can add more.

The second basic wash is the wet-on-wet technique. Start by wetting the area to be painted with clean water. Carefully load your brush and then start painting it into the wet area. The color will start to bleed and create gradations of tone depending on where you lay the wash and how wet or dry the paper is. This can be tricky and unpredictable, but that is what makes it look real and organic, and you can learn to control it more through practice. Combining these two basic wash techniques, and variations between, will produce a variety of effects. You should practice and experiment with both to learn to use and control the water’s natural behavior.

Making a value scale

The beauty of using a light-gray ink wash is that you can gradually build up values by layering washes. This consists of putting down a wash, allowing it to dry, and then putting another wash on top. Below I have included a value scale I made with the ink mixed earlier. Both scales were made by layering flat washes of light-gray. The first step on each scale is white, or the color of the paper, and does not have any wash. The second step is one layer of my wash, the third is two layers, the fourth is three layers… and so on down the scale. Here I made two scales to show the difference in wash tone. In the top scale I used an even wash with no pooling ink, and so the swatches have an even tone. In the bottom scale I allowed the ink to pool on the surface, and so the swatches are darker around the edges.

A simple value scale created by layering washes of light-gray.

Layering wash

With some basics down and nice gray wash mixed, you’re ready to start painting. The method I’m going to describe is my technique for layering ink wash to create multiple values. It can be both simple and complex, and I encourage you to deviate from it to find your own technique.

Get out your transfered image and stop. Looking at the original photo, note the places that you want to be white, in this case the color of the paper. Put down a flat wash in all the places you don’t want to be white. In my drawing these include the glare on my glasses and the background. Now wait, and this is important, until it is COMPLETELY dry. Before you start your next layer, note the places you want to be the gray of the previous layer. Paint your next layer avoiding those places, dry and repeat, getting darker with each additional layer. Do this until you have reached the darkest value you would like in your image and feel free to go back into areas and detail or darken more.

The first layer of ink wash

After many layers and time waiting to dry, I felt satisfied with my portrait. Still, I found the background to be a little boring, so I added some watercolor and then cut the paper down to the final image. I thought I was done… but wait.

My final layered ink wash with some watercolor added

Conclusion: taking it digital

Now that you have an original piece of art, you can scan it at high resolution or have high-quality photos taken. My piece was small enough to fit on a scanner, so I scanned it and made some adjustments in photoshop. Then I saved it for future use. Because it’s digital I can now remove things or copy specific pieces into other works, such as layouts. And there you have it, a work of fine art, and a digitized copy, so have fun!

Masking is an incredibly powerful tool for making textures and fades in the Creative Suite. Both Photoshop and Illustrator can create these effects, but there are pros and cons to using each. Making textures in Photoshop can often become cumbersome and tedious, due to both the interface and the nature of its graphics. In Illustrator however, textures are a breeze to make and edit, as well as being highly flexible vector graphics. In this tutorial I will show you how to use opacity masks in illustrator to create textured effects with ease.

First, a little bit of theory

Opacity masks are simple. Basically you have an object or layer, and a mask is applied on top, allowing layers below to show through. Masks are made of black, white or shades between (colors work too, but I would not advise it). By default, the black part of a mask will show through, and white will not, but this can be changed to suit different situations. Often I like to invert the mask, making my texture black, as you will see. Shades of gray lower the opacity of the object below in correspondence with the amount of black (ex. K=20 means 20% opacity). With these basic principles in mind, three patterns of mask emerge.

The first pattern is of a solid black or white texture applied over the object, as seen on the left in the example below. The second is of multiple textures with different shades of gray, creating multiple colors in the object. The last is of a gradient, which creates a fade.

Three basic variations of the opacity mask— a gradient, a solid and a grayscale texture.

Putting said theory into practice

Open a new document, whatever size you like, and paste your vector object and the texture into the art board. You should adjust the size of the texture depending on how you would like to overlay it on the object. In my case I’ve made it about the same size, so it will fill the shape nicely, while still allowing the texture to show. The size and appearance of the texture is up to you, so go wild, but remember to use black, white or gray. Here I’m using on of my scribble textures from the Life Under Glass Vector Pack. The icon is the Creative Commons Icon, available here.

Place your object and texture.

Select your texture and cut it from the art board, cmd+x or ctrl+x. Now select your object and double click on the empty window in the transparency palette. If you don’t see the window, make sure all of the options are displayed by clicking the drop-down in the top-right corner. The left window is the object, and the right window is the mask, just like in Photoshop.

You will also need to make sure that “Clip” has been checked. As a personal preference, I like to keep my textures filled with black before pasting, so I invert the opacity mask to make black the opaque part of my object. If I did not invert the opacity mask, my shape would still be invisible, unless I switched the texture’s fill to white. Either way works the same, so choose whichever you like best.

Cut the texture out and double click in the opacity mask window of the transparency palette, indicated in red.

You may think your object has disappeared, but it has not. Paste your texture back into the artboard and move it over where the object was before. In the example below my texture is filled with black; gray would work too, but not white because my mask is inverted.

With the opacity mask window still selected, paste the texture over the object and set the mask options.

When you are done positioning the mask object, deselect it to see how the object looks, and then click back on the left window of the transparency palette. Now you have an object with texture. The best part is that you can easily change the fill or stroke, or even use some effects, and the same mask applies. If you want to edit the mask again, all you have to do is click the mask window.

When you are done placing the texture, click back in the object window of the transparency palette.You can change the object or mask using fills, strokes, and effects like any other vector object. Above, the object was given a stroke, and then a guassian blur, while the mask was left unaltered.

Conclusion

There you have it, a textured vector object that’s easy to edit and change with only a few clicks. Because this is vector art, you can pull it into any of the Creative Suite applications without worrying about image loss. In the download you will find my original Ai file, complete with all the vectors used in the tutorial. As an added bonus, I’m including my new hand-drawn stamp vector. If you have any questions, or I have been unclear, please leave a comment.

This past July marked the fortieth anniversary of the moon landing. I’m too young, but my parents remember watching the moon landing, and the earlier space flights. I’ve grown up with the space shuttle and Mars rovers, but no lunar landing. It’s been forty years since we went to the moon, will it be another forty before we return? Some scientists have suggested returning to the moon and using it as a launching point for Mars, but with NASA’s funds diminishing, I’m left asking…when?

Concept on paper

Like all my illustrations, this one started in my sketchbook. One day I found myself drawing some rockets in a few different styles. Later I used them as references to make the digital illustration. The clouds were drawn, traced, refined, traced some more and then scanned. Once in the computer they were traced using the pen tool. Colors added using live-paint and shape layers.

In the Download

In this download you get the desktop wallpaper, plus a vector illustration. The vector file is sized as a wall poster (18×24) and I hope someday to screen-print it on some nice paper. Until then, enjoy!

Cloud computing is on the rise, but what does that mean anyway? More and more, people are storing their data and information on the internet (the cloud). This can include all kinds of services, from email to shared office documents. Data that’s accessible from anywhere is a great convenience, but is it vulnerable, and if so, to who? Google is at the forefront of cloud based services with GMail and Google Docs, but can we trust them. Will they protect our data from hackers, or are they the biggest threat themselves? The convenience of the cloud calls for us to trust the corporations hosting our data.

The Sketches

I sketched all of the pieces of this illustration separately and then digitized. I decided I did not like the top part of the cloud sketch, so I erased it in the computer. Later, I added the color layers with my wacom tablet and then arranged the final composition.

What’s in the download

In this download you get a desktop wallpaper (two sizes) and the final vector file.

Google yourself. I dare you. The privacy and anonymity that was cherished in the past is now gone. With facebook, twitter and blogs people are leaving their words all over the internet. Although this is great for communicating with friends and self-promotion, what is the cost on a person’s public identity? Will we be defined by the words we publish, no matter how big or small? How will future employers, friends and acquaintances see you? Will that facebook rant from ten years ago come back to haunt you? These are all scary questions, so before you hit that publish button be ready for your words to come under the looking glass.

The sketches

For this illustration I started with some simple doodles. I drew, traced and refined the mouse shape, and scribbled some swatches to use for texture. Later I digitized using live-trace and the pen tool.

What’s in the download

Included in this download are the desktop wallpapers, and a vector resource file. The file includes the pieces I used to create this digital illustration, plus some bonus scribble textures. If you would like something else to be included in the file, please let me know in the comments.